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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28803753">Just the Land Between</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake'>Blake</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Christian Bible, Historical RPF, Jesus Christ Superstar - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Divergence, Drinking, Everyone lives/Nobody dies, Goat Farm, Happy Ending, Historical Inaccuracy, I don't go here, Jesus fucks, M/M, Running Away, Wrestling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 09:53:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,021</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28803753</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Away from the garden, away from the city walls, under cover of night, you run and he follows.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jesus Christ/Judas Iscariot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Just the Land Between</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Come with me,” you say. It is the worst thing you have ever done.</p>
<p>He doesn’t even glance down at the hand you have extended. He looks only at your face, scrutinizing, searching for truth you’ve buried so deeply in your chest that it scratches and clutches at your heart trying to get to him. The soft evening light renders shadows of his eyes. His cheeks are sunken with exhaustion and sadness weighs heavy on his furrowed brow, but he is still so beautiful that you wonder how he could be real.</p>
<p>He does not ask you why or where you’re going. He just slips his narrow hand into yours with the air of someone handing over his entire life. You feel guilty, then, all the explanations and excuses you’d prepared catching and choking in your throat like bile. You squeeze his hand, bones shifting under your touch, and you stroke your thumb across the taut, dry skin of his palm, an apology for the betrayal you are about to inflict. </p>
<p>Hand in hand, you run. </p>
<p>Away from the garden, away from the city walls, under cover of night, you run and he follows. The only sounds are your ragged breaths and the striking of your sandals against the earth, his stride slightly longer and lighter than yours. You wonder why he does not ask you questions. You wonder if he still thinks you are leading him to his arrest. You wonder if he will forgive you when he finds out you are leading him as far away from it as possible.</p>
<p>You can’t even fully believe that he followed you, and you try not to get your hopes up about what it means. You are stealing a man away from his destiny, taking him from the martyrdom he was determined to have, and you have not yet decided how to explain why you feel the need to. So, you run, and he follows.</p>
<p>Your hands have separated and your pace slowed to a brisk walk long before the moon rises in front of you. In the new blue light, you look over at him, and he still bears the expression of someone being led to his death. The sweat has cooled to a shiny gleam across his brown skin. His dark eyes reflect only the moon.</p>
<p>You slow down further to share the water and bread you’ve brought. Miles away from here, your friends are likely being arrested or worse, in retaliation for the disappearance of the expected prisoner. You are afraid to find out if he loves those friends more than he loves you. Will he hate you for sacrificing them just to keep him?</p>
<p>You run until every bone in your feet aches, and then you run some more. When you lie down to rest, it is on the hard, bare earth with the moon watching over you both. You remove his sandals and clean the blood and lymph from his blistered ankles until his lips part and he starts to look at you as though realizing you are not taking him where he thought you were taking him. You don’t want him to realize that yet, when he could still turn right back around and turn himself in. You set his washed feet back into the earth and tell him to sleep. You lie on your side a few feet away and try to quell the churning in your stomach, the impossible longing for him to realize what you’ve done and thank you for it.</p>
<p>In the morning, you open your eyes to the sight of him sitting beside you and looking off into the distance. The sun casts his skin in bronze. You ache at his beauty, though you could never articulate what it was made of, for his features were ordinary enough and not so different from your own. But the sunlight loves him, and the blood-red hues in his brown eyes shine under its touch and it moves you to look at him. You have woken near to his side like this for years now. You would like to wake by his side every day.</p>
<p>The questions start after you’ve finished the bread, sipped some water, taken turns pissing behind a scraggly tree, and started off barefoot into the hills.</p>
<p>“Why are you doing this?” he asks.</p>
<p>A lot goes unspoken between you. There is no mention of what else you would be doing, if you had not changed your mind and decided against turning him into the authorities. You suspect he knows much more about you than he will ever say. “It is better for our people,” you say, hoping and fearing that he knows much more about you than you will ever say.</p>
<p>“My running away won’t help them,” he says coolly. </p>
<p>“Yeah, well you dying won’t help them either.”</p>
<p>He narrows his eyes at the sky as though considering debating the point. You know exactly how much time he has spent these past few weeks trying to convince himself that there’s value in dying, that it will raise awareness and incite change. You have heard him mumbling under his breath and dropping hints that suggest he thinks death is his only way out.</p>
<p>He doesn’t argue the point, but you don’t pretend that he’s not thinking it.</p>
<p>The inn appears on the horizon just as you start to worry about fainting from hunger. Your purse is heavy with silver. He eyes it with a thoughtful scowl on his face as you pay the innkeeper, but he says nothing until after you’ve eaten and taken wine to your meager room.</p>
<p>Then, he laughs. It’s a dark laugh, full of pain. It turns your stomach. “I can’t believe I let you steal me away. I have a duty to my people.”</p>
<p>“As do I,” you shout, because he always finds it so easy to believe he’s the only person in the world who thinks of the good of others.</p>
<p>“This is how you fulfill that duty?” he asks, sipping more from the bottle, staining his lips red.</p>
<p>Something defensive and sharp with claws takes hold of your chest. You swipe the bottle away from him and wipe your hand across his slack lips and soft beard. When you pull your hand back with a shock, your palm is stained red with wine from his mouth. “By buying time for their so-called savior? Yes.”</p>
<p>“They would be happy to have me die for them. Maybe it would wake them up.”</p>
<p>You slide across the floor where you’re both sitting, get close enough to shake him by both shoulders. You’ve thought this through, to some extent. “But think of how much hope it would bring them to know you’ve escaped, to know you might come back for them.”</p>
<p>“You mean to know I ran away, chose my own safety instead of dying for my beliefs?”</p>
<p>He’s so frustrating, sometimes you wonder why you love him at all. You push him onto his back just to see him fall. “Would you have your followers believe that dying is the only way to be good?” His eyes shut, lashes fluttering black and heavy across his cheeks. “Or do you just need them to believe you’re better than they are?”</p>
<p>He knocks into you abruptly, sending you onto your back, which you now realize is what you wanted. He makes a fist in your shirt. Your spine grinds into the floor. His eyes flash with anger you’ve been both avoiding and craving all day. You wrestle him back onto the ground and he pushes back, limbs hard against yours, hands strong where they twist in your skin. You feel yourself choking on a smile. This is the man whose temper upended a marketplace, whose fury at injustice inspired you years ago, whose impatience simmers constantly behind a façade of gentleness, whose cutting insults went underappreciated by everyone but you. This is not the man who had spent the past weeks trying to give up on living.</p>
<p>You roll around and pin each other, grappling for flesh and an upper hand, but not for victory. The tension between you thrums like the wet breaking of a rainstorm.</p>
<p>But it dies out quickly. He retreats into himself, lying flat on the floor beneath you and looking up at you without fire in his eyes. Even the panting of his breath is so much milder than yours. “What would you have me do, then, if not die for love of my people?”</p>
<p>Defeat swells in your gut. You lower yourself weakly onto your elbows, so tired of fighting him. You rest your head on his rising chest and then you fall together. “No one wants you to show your love by dying,” you plead. You do not want to, but you plead. </p>
<p>“How, then?” he whispers, voice broken, and you’re not even sure if he’s addressing you or the heavens, but the fact that he’s sharing the question with you at all makes you want to weep. </p>
<p>You pull back, press yourself up just high enough that you can look down into his eyes. You’ve thought it out so many times, prepared the arguments you’ll use to persuade him. <em>We’ll use the silver to buy a small place to live, far away from any city. We’ll raise goats at first, for milk and then for food and then to share with needy. You’ll take up carpentry, carve beautiful things into wood and make people happy. We’ll lie in wait, growing stronger, inspiring people one at a time instead of all at once.</em></p>
<p>But your tears are caught in your throat, drowning your words in saltwater. You have never been brave enough to hope for him to love you the way you love him, but whatever you are now, with pockets full of swindled silver and a fugitive in your arms, it is beyond courage and cowardice. </p>
<p>You close your eyes and press your lips onto his, which are still as stone but warm, alive. Your heart races at your own betrayal, at the thought that for all your rationalizations for wanting to take him away from his friends and save his life, this is the only real reason for anything. You sniffle and suck at his bearded lip, wanting just a taste before he realizes what you’ve done, what your love for him has led you to do. You feel as though your entire life must have been leading up to this moment, and your memory will forever be defined by this one kiss, this one betrayal, this one choice: your love for him over your love for the rest of the world.</p>
<p>His hand finds your jaw, his lips close around yours, returning your kiss, and your thoughts are swept away by the peace and passion of feeling that you know some call divine.</p>
<p>When the moon rises, its light finds you by his side in the small cot. He studies your face and lifts individual curls off your forehead just to watch them drop again. Your hand is still buried in the thick crush of his hair, and you don’t know whether you’ll ever let go. “Goats, you say?” he murmurs, neither enthusiastic nor mocking. You blush to think of when you ended up telling him about your plans, because you must have been so caught up in the moment that you can’t remember doing so.</p>
<p>With your free hand, you grab his narrow, sweat-slick hip and draw him close enough so you can bury your face in his shoulder. “Yes,” you say, desperate for him to approve of your proposal. You want him to love the way you love him, not just forgive it. You breathe in the sharp tang of his sweat to distract yourself from the gnawing doubt in your stomach.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he quietly agrees, a humid sigh against your face. You look up to watch him shut his eyes against the moonlight. There’s a small, soft smile on his lips, the first you’ve seen in weeks. It is the best thing you have ever done.</p>
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